4- Semantics

what is meaning?

Meaning is the relation between a linguistic expression and the entity for which it can be used.” (Plag et al. 2015: 147)
- meaning is a stable property of a liguistic expresion

what is the refernt?

Referent is the object/entitiy for which a speaker uses a particular expression.

• determinded by context (that cat over there; not just any cat)

what is a mental category?

= concept that is used to classify objects, i. e. a concept.

Denotation

the class of entities to which a linguistic entity potentially refers, the set of potential referents.

the actual things in the world the word refers to

COMPOSITIONAL AND NON-COMPOSITIONAL MEANING

• compositional: combine words to create meaning "—> the yellow house meaning a house in yellow colour; each word literally

• non-compositional: no literal word-for-word meaning= “its raining cats and dogs” → for heavy rain

• Compounds are inherently ambiguous
  --> may change from sentence to sentence
  

What is the mental lexicon?

The human word storage
−  differs from a book dictionary withrespect to the

• number of words

• amount of information

• up-to-dateness

• organization

speech errors

Things we mix up in speech production must be represented in our minds, and they must have some connection with each other

Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon

We know what we want to say, but we cannot retrieve the word,

semantic information vs. phonological information
− We can access the semantic information, but cannot (fully) access the phonological information.

IMPACTS ON HOW WE STORE WORDS IN THE MENTAL LEXICON

• frequency of occurrence
  − age of acquisition
  − morphological family size (love, loves, loveable, lover, etc.)
  − number of phonologically related words
  − number of orthographically related words

priming tasks

first prime word (related to word x)
the word x is shown -> researchers interesst word
- related prime words lead to shorter reaction times
- related‘ can refer to phonological, morphological, semantic or syntactic relatedness.

Hyponomy

umbrella/ head term and examples that fit into the category

hyperonym : animal <-> hyonyms : dog, cat

what types of opposites exsist?

• complementaries

• antonyms

• converses

• reverses

what is complemetaries

pair of words that refer to a distinction where there is no in-between –categorical opposition ->  dead – alive)

what are antonyms

pair of words that refer to two extreme points on a scale – gradient opposites-> hot – cold,)

Converses

pair of words that refer to a relational state ofaffairs from opposite viewpoints -> buy – sell

Reverses

pair of words that refer to a change of direction ->  push - pull

Synonymy

Relation between words with the same meaning (couch - sofa)
Synonymy is semantic equivalence between two or more lexemes
synonymy is only partial, i.e. most words are not interchangeable in all contexts. -> diffrence in style
true synonymy rare

connotation

Associations with a word that are not sense relations.
- based on world knowledge (often emotive) -> summer- sun- beach

Polysemy

The same word with same form, but different related meanings.
exp. "wing"
meaning: wing of a bird, of a plane or wing in a building
One single lexeme − Different, but related meanings

Homonymy

Two different words with the same form but different unrelated meanings
exp. "ball" -> football or dance
=Words unrelated in meaning, identical in form
- Homophones: words unrelated in meaning that sound alike but are spelled differently
- Homographs: words unrelated in meaning that are spelled alike but sound differently